French officials said Monday that investigators obtained voice data from the cockpit of the black boxes of the Ukrainian plane mistakenly shot down by Iran in January.
“CVR data, including the event itself, has been successfully downloaded,” the BEA research office in France wrote in a tweet.
Iranian forces shot down Ukraine International Airlines’ Boeing 737 aircraft, killing all 176 people on board, after mistaking it for a missile on January 8.
The deadly incident occurred during a period of intense tensions with the U.S., just hours after Iran fired missiles at Iraqi air bases that were harboring U.S. troops in retaliation for a U.S. drone attack that killed the Iran’s main military commander, General Qassim Soleimani, in early January.
FILE: Rescue teams search the scene where a Ukrainian plane crashed in Shahedshahr, southwest of Tehran, Iran.
(AP)
Initially, Iran attributed the accident to technical problems and only acknowledged having shot down the plane days later.
Iran has been in intense negotiations with Ukraine, Canada and other nations that had citizens on board the downed plane, and who have demanded a thorough investigation of the incident.
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Iran’s semi-official news agency reported on Saturday that Iran sent the black box of the Ukrainian passenger plane to France for reading.
The report quotes Mohsen Baharvand, an assistant to Iran’s foreign minister, saying the black box of the downed plane was transported to Paris on Friday, accompanied by Iranian civil aviation and judicial officials.
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It is unclear why Iran sent the black box to France. Boeing is an American company, and Iranian experts needed a converter to retrieve the data from the box, but the United States opposed providing it to Iran.
Associated Press contributed to this report..
